Pre-prints in the academic community

Pre-print is an author's completed manuscript but it has not yet gone through the peer-review stage. Pre-prints are often submitted for publication and their revised versions are eventually published in journals. While the final, published version of a paper is undoubtedly of higher quality after going through formal peer review, pre-prints are still gaining popularity and have many advantages. They allow faster and wider dissemination and immediate discussion of research results.

Preprints have several characteristic features:

• they are not peer-reviewed before publication. Authors only need to go through a few initial review steps (usually related to file format, file name, relevance and content relevance) to have their manuscript posted as a preprint;
  
• pre-prints can have DOI. This will increase discoverability, accessibility, and reusability of these papers;
  
• new pre-prints are posted almost daily;
  
• once a pre-print is online, it can be modified as long as reasons are given. However, earlier versions of a given pre-print will still remain in the public domain;
  
• pre-prints are free for both authors and readers.
  

Publishing a manuscript as a preprint has both advantages and disadvantages.

Pros:

1. Immediate access. Dissemination of research results is not limited by peer-review deadlines.
   
2. Superiority. The rapid appearance of a paper in the open access means with a greater likelihood of leadership in that research.
   
3. Support of open science. Anyone can read, download and cite pre-prints without restriction, which is a key principle of open science;
   
4. Increasing the number of platforms for disseminating information. One is more likely to be invited to present their research at conferences and publish results in peer-reviewed journals.
   
5. Opportunities for feedback. One can get comments from fellow scientists and improve one's manuscript before submitting it to a peer-reviewed journal.
   

Cons:

1. Risk of losing the opportunity to publish in a peer-reviewed journal. Some journals do not accept manuscripts that have been previously uploaded as pre-prints.
   
2. Due to the lack of policies to control the content posted on pre-print servers, researchers may steal someone else's ideas by reading a manuscript on a pre-print server and use them in their own publications.
   
3. Poor quality. The lack of peer review often affects the quality of manuscripts.